Businesses in which the assets responsible for the generation of revenues are dispersed over wide geographic regions have existed for many years. For example, a vending machine operator may have hundreds of vending machines located at schools, office buildings, etc. across a large metropolitan area. Similarly, many oil companies are known to own and operate numerous oil wells located amongst multiple states if not also across multiple continents.
Managing such dispersed field assets generally requires a significant amount of resources. Typically, a technician travels a service route that takes him to each of the vending machines in the vending business operator's network. Such a service method may have the technician returning to a vending machine only once every month. As such, great expenditures of time and money are likely to be incurred in order to effect proper maintenance of each of the field assets.
In addition to the significant resources needed to effectively manage such distributed asset businesses, there also exists a substantial risk for lost revenues. For example, if a field asset becomes disabled shortly after a technician visit, it may be some time before the technician returns to the disabled asset to discover and render the needed repairs. During the down time of the field asset, no revenues can be generated by the disabled asset. Similarly, if a vending machine should deplete its inventory, that vending machine will not be able to generate revenues until a technician returns and restocks the inventory.